Hi Roger,

Your comments lead me to believe that you have never actually read all of the reports at my two Web sites. If you had read them then you would have seen that there is some information at one of them regarding some of my other earthquake forecasts.

Here is some information regarding a few of them.

On December 30, 1994 I sent a FAX to NEIS personnel in Golden, Colorado warning them to begin watching for an earthquake which I thought might be about half as destructive as the September 29, 1993 Maharashtra, India earthquake which reportedly claimed some 10,000 lives. And several weeks later an earthquake decimated the city of Kobe, Japan with some 6000 lives lost, fairly close to the number implied in my forecast. In an older version of this bulletin board I even circulated a forecast once for an earthquake which I though might be bad enough to claim between 5 and 20 lives. And a few days later one in Peru reportedly claimed some 15 lives. If I remember correctly, at some point after that I began telling people that I was no longer going to include possible casualty numbers with my forecasts. I found it to be personally upsetting when they turned out to be accurate, regardless of why they were accurate, coincidence or otherwise.

At the time that the catastrophic January 26, 2001 earthquake occurred in India I had already been on and off the telephone with people including disaster mitigation personnel across the U.S. for about five hours trying to get them ready to respond to a highly destructive earthquake and trying to see if anyone else in the earthquake forecasting community could provide some confirmation for my forecast.

I could discuss quite a few other forecasts that I have made. But what would that accomplish? It has been my observation that people often form strong opinions fairly quickly regarding whether or not earthquakes can be forecast. And once they have done that it is nearly impossible to get them to change their minds.

I am fairly certain that you have never seen one of my forecasts for a really destructive earthquake. I have not circulated one in quite a while. Perhaps you should regard that as a blessing.

Finally, as you appear to me to be, I myself am also of the opinion that it would be wonderful if we could organize forecasts so that they are nice and neat and easy to study. Unfortunately, in the real world things do not work like that. My own forecasting program has been gradually pieced together using whatever time, knowledge, and resources were available. And there have been occasions when those resource limitations caused invaluable opportunities to save lives to be missed. At the time that that second highly destructive earthquake occurred in 1999 in Turkey I was expecting one. But I was encountering so many problems with just maintaining an Internet telephone link at the time that I was able to send a warning to officials in only one country. And unfortunately it was not Turkey.